Sōseki's original title, Wagahai wa Neko de Aru, uses very high-register phrasing more appropriate to a nobleman, conveying a grandiloquence and self-importance intended to sound ironic, since the speaker, an anthropomorphiseddomestic cat, is a regular house cat of a teacher, and not of a high ranking noble as the high-register suggests.

The book was first published in ten installments in the literary journalHototogisu. At first, Sōseki intended only to write the short story that constitutes the first chapter of I Am a Cat. However, Takahama Kyoshi, one of the editors of Hototogisu, persuaded Sōseki to serialize the work, which evolved stylistically as the installments progressed. Nearly all the chapters can stand alone as discrete works.

In the mid-1970s, the prolific screenwriter Toshio Yasumi adapted Sōseki's novel into a screenplay. Kon Ichikawa directed the film, which premiered in Japanese cinemas in 1975. The novel was also adapted into a film released in 1936, and an anime television special aired in 1982.

In I Am a Cat, a supercilious, feline narrator describes the lives of an assortment of middle-class Japanese people: Mr. Sneaze[1] ("sneeze" is misspelled on purpose, but literally translated from Chinno Kushami (珍野苦沙弥), in the original Japanese) and family (the cat's owners), Sneaze's garrulous and irritating friend Waverhouse (迷亭,Meitei), and the young scholar Avalon Coldmoon (水島寒月,Mizushima Kangetsu) with his will-he-won't-he courtship of the businessman's spoiled daughter, Opula Goldfield (金田富子,Kaneda Tomiko).